Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

This article traces fourteen years of the life of lesbian-feminist poet-activist Minnie Bruce Pratt in the state of North Carolina from 1968 to 1972. This history of Pratt's movement through North Carolina demonstrates that the landscape of the state, both its lesbian-feminist and natural ecologies, shaped Pratt's writing long after she left. First, Pratt's involvement in a radical, supportive, and connected community of lesbian-feminists across the South and nation fed her-figuratively and literally-as she embraced her identity as a lesbian in the mid-1970s. Second, it illuminates the strength and influence of the important North Carolina lesbian-feminist print movement, of which Pratt and the women of Feminary, a southern lesbian-feminist literary journal, were part. This movement developed anti-racist and anti-misogynist critiques of southern culture that spread in lesbian-feminist communities throughout the United States. The women of Feminary also produced a specific, non-essentialist view of womanhood through natural imagery that continued to influence Pratt's writing and engagement with the natural world throughout her life. Finally, it shows how violent anti-gay and racist events in North Carolina shook Pratt and developed her social justice consciousness, first in Fayetteville and later within the lesbian and gay movement in Durham. These experiences also connected the burgeoning lesbian movement to the broader activist Left in the state. Although the work produced by the lesbian-feminist community of Durham, North Carolina has had a far-reaching impact on the national movement, the size of the community itself was small. Understanding Durham's lesbian-feminist community illuminates Pratt's political and artistic perspective. Similarly, Pratt's biography and creative output highlight the story of North Carolina as a lesbian-feminist hub in the late twentieth century.

Historians have long argued that queer women in urban spaces received a level of legal and social tolerance or impunity toward their same sex relationships. This article argues that queer women were not arrested on charges of homosexuality or sodomy, but on charges of public indecency, "crimes of lewdness," distribution of immoral literature, or prostitution. The use of sex work archives such as the Committee of Fourteen allows scholars to uncover more intersectional lesbian narratives by focusing on those who were most heavily impacted by vice and penal reform. Some historians have laid scholarly foundations by noting the queer subcultures within cooperative housing buildings in cities such as Chicago and New York. However, few historians have used the rich archive built around surveilling female sex workers to identify under-represented lesbian subcultures in this period. While white and upper-class queer women may have been able to live together without raising concerns or accusations of sexual misconduct, the existing social and judicial attitudes toward Black and working-class immigrant women's sexuality meant that their same-sex relationships made them a greater target than their white counterparts. While sex work provided means for queer women of any race to support themselves outside of a marriage to a man, Black queer women were disproportionately prosecuted. By understanding the history of early twentieth century sex work and lesbian communities as inextricable, scholars can uncover narratives of working class, Black queer women who have been systematically erased from the historical record.

When Adrienne Rich wrote Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, she indicated the erasure of lesbian lives from heteronormative life worlds in the Anglo-American context. Lesbian existence is a critical way of fighting compulsory heterosexuality and speaks of bonds and friendships that go beyond sexual desire between two cis women. With the concept of the lesbian continuum, Adrienne Rich represented woman-identified experiences that carry the possibility of politically realigning the relationship between the lesbian and the feminist. This paper is interested in understanding the textures of companionship in the 1980s and 1990s in urban India among lesbian identifying cis women. We engage with the narratives of lesbian identifying individuals who developed companionship and kinship through social stigma, legal oppression and political erasure. Today, all above 50 years of age, their life journeys of discrimination and political togetherness help sharpen the lesbian continuum. In their narratives of companionship are folded stories of resistance, subversion and resilience, of opening up their homes and hearts for queer and trans* individuals to connect, form friendships and care networks. By focusing on these lives' spatial and historical contexts and struggles, we ask if lesbian companionship can sharpen the concept of the lesbian continuum to arrive at a renewed understanding of kinship, care and solidarity. Apart from resistance against compulsory heterosexuality, what other possibilities can lesbian companionships and lesbian continuum present for trans-feminist solidarities?

This roundtable features a conversation with three scholar-activists Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Matt Richardson, each of whom engaged deeply with Minnie Bruce Pratt's work and life in different ways. Mohanty and Okazawa-Rey were both faculty members with Pratt at Hamilton College in New York and the Union Institute in Ohio and Mohanty later worked with her at Syracuse University. The three sustained a friendship spanning across decades and different geographic locations. Richardson first met Pratt in the 1990s at a writing workshop he organized and then worked with her through the Feminist Studies editorial collective; although Richardson did not have the same sustained relationship with Pratt, he was shaped by her work and her presence in his life. Together, roundtable participants reflect on their relationships with Pratt, draw our attention to the nuanced ways Pratt theorized identity, and discuss how she might make sense of our current moment, remembering that for Pratt theory was connected to everyday life and thus, immensely political and personal.

This article considers how Britain's 1921 census can be a source for histories of lesbian activism. It explores evidence that the census returns were a site of lesbian resistance and considers the implications for our own histories and understandings of activism. It asks whether these official forms can be considered as messages from our forebears to the future, and what that means for our activism today: The 1921 census form required everyone present in a household on the night of 19 June to be recorded, and their relationship to its 'head' to be stated: a process of categorization which reified patriarchal family relations. However, a small number of women - some known to have been in committed relationships with each other - rejected the official directions in favor of their own relationship categories including 'joint head' or 'joint occupier'. They did so in a context where their relationships were legally unspeakable, hierarchies of gender were intimately entwined with those of sexuality and race, and the heteronormative family was positioned as central to the survival of the nation.

Their rebellions are both a form of activism and an archive within an archive, allowing historians to capture experiences which might otherwise be unrecorded. In a time where patriarchal hierarchies are being reasserted, listening to these messages from the past has taken on new urgency.

This article examines Las Hermanas Women's Cultural Center and Coffeehouse, a 1970s lesbian of color feminist space in San Diego, as a site of radical care, collective memory, and archival refusal. Drawing on oral histories, logbook entries, and feminist newspapers, I argue that Las Hermanas functioned as a lesbian brown commons: a place where care, anonymity, and collective labor forged political resistance. Grounded in queer of color critique, affect theory, and feminist historiography, I argue that the community's fragmentary archive and strategic opacity reflect a method of historiographical resistance. Rather than reading archival gaps as absence, I interpret them as intentional refusals that safeguard community and shape an alternative lesbian public history. This article contributes to queer historiography and feminist archival studies by theorizing care and refusal as foundational to lesbian of color memory work.

This article addresses the lack of critical considerations of mothering in the field of queer studies. The anti-social turn in queer theory advocates a turn away from procreation and frames the mother as the transmitter of a heteronormative legacy. In this way, queer theory naturalizes the association between the assigned female at birth body, womanhood, motherhood, and heterosexuality and precludes considerations of queer and feminist mothering. Autobiographical writing by queer mothers challenges this depiction of motherhood as inherently normative. In her poetry collection Crime Against Nature, the late Minnie Bruce Pratt describes losing custody of her children under a North Carolina sodomy law after coming out as a lesbian in 1975. Pratt's insistence on claiming her queer sexuality despite severe social sanctions refuses the characterization of the mother as heteronormative. I place Pratt in conversation with two later memoirs of queer motherhood, Cherríe Moraga's Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts to consider Pratt's legacy to queer discourse. I read these narratives of queer feminist maternal subjectivities through the lens of the "sodomitical mother" to challenge the framing of the maternal body as always white, heterosexual, cisgender, sexually modest, and in service to the hegemonic social order. These accounts of queer feminist maternal subjectivities challenge current right-wing attacks on 2SLGBTQ+ rights that seek to "protect" children from access to education on race, gender, and sexuality in the name of a presumably white, heterosexual, and cisgender parent.

The 2023 Italian translation of The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig offers an opportunity to reconsider the author as an important figure in the history of feminism and the lesbian movement in Italy. Since its first translation in 1976, the text has fascinated the Italian women's movement, even though Wittig's original vision was partly obscured by the dominance of sexual difference theory, which framed lesbianism as an experience internal to sexual difference, rather than as a political rupture with the heterosexual order. Focusing on translation as a site of political action and feminist conflict, this article compares the 1976 and 2023 Italian translations within their respective historical contexts and in relation to the evolution of Italian feminism, highlighting the shifting cultural and political significance of The Lesbian Body in Italy and Wittig's enduring power to unsettle, provoke, and inspire readers across generations.

This essay pushes back against mainstream queer and feminist discourses that assume an ontological distinction between lesbians and straight women. This distinction is a commonplace feature of a spate of recent books and films produced and marketed to mainstream feminist audiences. This idea of sexuality as ontology is key to the resurgence of biological determinism that has defined LGBT political advocacy in the twenty-first century. This biological determinism, or what we might call, following Lady Gaga, the "born this way" discourse, has pushed feminist discourse into a fatalistic heteropessimism, or the idea that heterosexuality is irredeemable but that straight women are simply stuck with it. This, despite the reality that many women can and do refuse to become or to remain heterosexual. Such discourses, I argue, are profoundly anti-feminist because they obscure how heterosexuality works as a political system. Thus, under the guise of admiring lesbians' freedom from men, heteropessimist feminism paradoxically reinscribes heteropatriarchy's status as natural. Instead of accepting the limited gains that the "born this way" discourse has achieved, we must advocate for sexual freedom and autonomy built around the fundamental premise that our desires are contextual, not static, innate, and unchangeable.

The present review explored the prevalence and factors of mental health conditions among lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual minority women (LBSW) in Southeast Asia. It found that the rates of significant depression and depressive symptoms range from 10% to 93.2%, with a median of 27.7%. This wide range can be due to a study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which found elevated depression, stress, and anxiety rates. Studies also highlight high levels of sadness, hopelessness, sleep and eating problems, fatigue, and suicidal thoughts among LBSW. Suicide rates indicate that LBSW have higher odds of suicidal ideations and attempts than their heterosexual peers in the region. Additionally, bisexual and polysexual women report higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal behaviors than lesbian women, necessitating tailored mental health interventions. Substance use among LBSW is also notable, including smoking and heavy drinking, though some rates are below the global average. Factors influencing mental health include openness about sexuality, coping styles, and discrimination. Discrimination is linked to various mental health issues, supporting the minority stress model's applicability in the region. Aging-related factors also affect mental health among LBSW, with older age being possibly protective against depression. Overall, this review highlights the urgent need for more inclusive mental health research and interventions in the region. Recommendations include training healthcare providers, developing tailored mental health programs, adopting suicide prevention initiatives, enacting anti-discrimination laws, and addressing substance use. Future research should focus on underrepresented regions and older LBSW.